True-crime documentaries, especially the kind that pop up regularly on streaming services, are defined by their tropes as much as their content: shots of crime-scene tape, re-enactments with actors seen only from behind, interviews with cops who use similar phrases to describe what happened, no matter the misdeed. Because the form is so familiar, it’s easy to imitate, deconstruct and, of course, satirize. Parodies like Netflix’s “American Vandal” and the recent “Missing Wives” skit on “Saturday Night Live” make us laugh, while more serious offerings, like the HBO shows “Mind Over Murder” and “The Yogurt Shop Murders,” ask us to examine our cultural obsession with true crime.
As its cheeky title suggests, Charlie Shackleton’s new documentary, “Zodiac Killer Project,” (in select theaters), is not just a straight-faced film about the much-covered case of the Zodiac killer. But neither is it purely satirical or analytical. Shackleton’s work is often invested in the nature of cinema itself. For instance, his 2021 film, “The Afterlight,” made up of film fragments depicting actors who are no longer alive, existed only as a single 35-millimeter print intended to eventually erode completely, since film slowly disintegrates each time it is projected. So “Zodiac Killer Project” was never going to be a conventional documentary about a serial killer.
But to hear Shackleton tell it — he’s the narrator — standard true crime is what he was going for initially. He tried to get the rights to a 2012 book titled “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge,” self-published by a California Highway Patrol officer, Lyndon E. Lafferty. Lafferty claimed that he locked eyes with the real Zodiac killer, a man he called George Russell Tucker, at a rest stop in 1971, and that powerful people tried to protect Tucker from being discovered. Shackleton almost had the rights, but the deal fell through for reasons he says he does not fully understand.
So instead, Shackleton tells us how he would have made the movie if he had landed the rights. What we get is a meta-film about true-crime documentaries: the way they’re constructed, the way they’re designed to work and the reasons they’re so effective, even addictive. Using new and stock footage, Shackleton explains what the title sequence might have looked like, how he would have hooked us, what kind of establishing shots he would have used and so on. Into this he splices clips from well-known entries in the genre like “The Jinx,” to illuminate the tricks of the trade, particularly the Netflix flavor of true crime. Sometimes he puts clips from two productions side by side, showing how the same visual language, or even the exact same words, are used.
The effect is often hilarious, especially when he reminds us of how often we’re manipulated by these films. At one point he shows us a “police station,” then wryly remarks that this building is actually a library. Halfway through, Shackleton himself appears onscreen, telling someone off-camera why he finds Lafferty’s version of events so interesting. He’s actually invested in the crime story; he’s watched these films. He knows how he’s manipulated by them, and how we are, too. That’s why he’s made this film.
Watching “Zodiac Killer Project,” I thought a little bit of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” the parody of musician biopics that made it impossible for me to ever watch one again without clocking its clichés. But there’s more to “Zodiac Killer Project” than simple parody. It’s slipperier, because you’re not quite sure at the end what you’re watching: Is this a tribute to true crime? An analytical essay? A takedown? An audition by a filmmaker who really wants a job with Netflix? The truth is that Shackleton isn’t settling for one mode; he’s working in a bunch of them at once, mixing affection and critique. Just like any true fan would.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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